I started writing something about funding community media houses using fees extracted from cable companies, something that local governments will have more political leverage to do with this recent FCC ruling, but as I look back at the dissenting opinions from the Republican commissioners, and the palpable fear of claiming anything close to regulation in the final FCC order, I feel pretty deflated. Don’t get me wrong, its good that net neutrality was preserved, but we should also call it what it is: holding ground. This wasn’t a step forward, it was a lot of work and campaigning just to keep a not terrible status quo.

Here’s the first two paragraphs of what I was about to write:

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Chances are you listen to a couple as well. You might also subscribe to some YouTube channels or follow a live stream account. Maybe you read a small circulation magazine. There’s certainly been a lot of ink spilled about the democratizing effects of consumer devices that afford all of this new media and there’s been an equal amount of rigorous research into what sorts of communities they engender: fan groups, social movements, and radical (left and right) political affinities just to name a few. What we don’t talk about very often are the kinds of organizations that make something like Welcome to NightVale or The Ideas Channel possible in the first place. One consequence of that is a serious lack of political imagination with regards to what we should be demanding from the governments and corporations that hold the keys to the server cabinets. There are lots of ways to take this but, in light of the recent FCC ruling on Net Neutrality lets focus on something that seems eminently possible now that wasn’t before: regional networks owned and operated by the communities they are meant to serve.

As cable companies were carving out their markets it became commonplace for local governments to start negotiating for extra goodies in exchange for a place on the telephone pole. Public access television was often the beneficiary of these deals but in the last few decades those deals have extracted fewer resources for the public and public access programming has to compete with hundreds instead of dozens of channels. Then there’s the Internet. It makes little sense to limit your media to a local TV market when you can quickly and easily post a YouTube video. Middle class people might find it easy enough to make media with the tools available but we could certainly do more to provide lending libraries for this sort of thing. It might also be nice to rent space in a real sound studio.

That all seems pretty reasonable, right? I was gonna talk about revitalizing libraries as a place to not only read but also “write” media. I had this great idea for an extended metaphor about “gaining write access” to government-funded media but then I made the mistake of looking over the dissenting opinions to find some kind of counter-intuitive, even-the-Republicans-could-agree sort of argument but the wind was out of my sails. The conversations at the highest level are so cynical that they appear as afterthoughts: like they were written long before an actual decision was even reached. For example, here’s a line from the press release describing the official order:

the Order DOES NOT require broadband providers to contribute to the Universal Service Fund under Section 254.

and yet, here is the dissenting opinion from Commissioner Pai:

One avenue for higher bills is the new taxes and fees that will be applied to broadband. Here’s the background. If you look at your phone bill, you’ll see a “Universal Service Fee,” or something like it. These fees—what most Americans would call taxes—are paid by Americans on their telephone service. They funnel about $9 billion each year through the FCC. Consumers haven’t had to pay these taxes on their broadband bills because broadband has never before been a Title II service.
But now it is. And so the Order explicitly opens the door to billions of dollars in new taxes. Indeed, it repeatedly states that it is only deferring a decision on new broadband taxes—not prohibiting them.

Obviously there’s a lot of bad faith arguments happening here. Either the FCC as a whole is trying to deflect everyone’s attention from the possibilities of new taxes, or Commissioner Pai is using a tried-and-true mix of slippery slope scare tactics to make people fear the protection of existing broadband regulation. All of this misses the point that broadband should be paying into the Universal Service Fund. That was the fund that redistributed wealth from people that could afford telephones to people that could not afford telephones or lived in regions where it wasn’t profitable to run telephone lines. It was a tremendous revenue generator, modernized many regions that would have otherwise been cut off entirely, and in the long run actually forced Bell to think really long term about infrastructure. This is a good thing that one side is vilifying and the other is desperately, IN ALL CAPS trying to distance itself from.

So I’m not going to do the thing where I describe some really useful public program with the annual operating budget of a HellFire missile and watch it just sit there looking politically untenable. I’m really happy for all the people that see this as a huge win, and it is definitely a good thing that came out of tons of tireless work, but it only take a minor zooming out in scope and time to see that this is a somewhat minor victory. This is making things not actively suck worse. It is creating the potential for possibly better ways of doing things but we need to demand so much more.

]]>http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2015/03/03/would-if-nah-itll-never-happen/feed/0the only life you could savehttp://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2015/02/27/the-only-life-you-could-save/
http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2015/02/27/the-only-life-you-could-save/#commentsSat, 28 Feb 2015 02:37:19 +0000http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/?p=19733

A couple of days ago I finished writing a short story and burst into tears.

Anyone who knows me knows I have a lot of emotions. The point of this story is the story.

It started out as a story about a mysterious plague of suicides documented and shared via social media, which I seized on just because it resonated for a bunch of reasons, and I felt like writing something profoundly troubling. What it became was a story about me, about what the last year has been like, about what the last six years have been like – in a graduate program regarding which I seem to be moving from feelings of ambivalence to outright anger and resentment – and really what it’s been like since we first started using these technologies to connect with each other.

It’s about being a Millennial and what being a Millennial is like right now, all the clickbait headlines and ridiculous thinkpieces aside. It’s about fear and anger and loneliness, hopelessness.

It’s also about courage, and about the networks and technologies that allow us to take care of each other, especially when no one else is really able to.

Here’s the thing about things like Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr – especially those two latter for me, in part because they aren’t subject to the same kind of emotional algorithmic filtering. They allow us to share information and organize, sure. They help facilitate political action. They’re exploited by the powerful and the marginalized alike. They alter how we move through the world, how we understand ourselves and each other, how we understand the past and the present and the future. Okay, sure; all of those things.

But I look back on everything that’s happened to me, my life with these things, and what I think I see more clearly than anything else is that they’ve allowed us to take care of each other.

It’s not perfect. It’s not ideal. It is sure as hell not evenly distributed. It’s not the same for everyone, because no one is exactly the same. But it’s something. It’s an important thing. Sometimes it’s the only thing.

It’s very difficult to explain that to people who haven’t experienced it. Those people tend to be the same people devaluing these things, trying to draw distinctions between them and real connection. Those people also tend to be the people who set a lot of the popular discourse around this stuff. Maybe our generation won’t do that; probably we’ll find something else with which to do the same thing. It sort of seems to be what we do.

But in the meantime we do this. We create these spaces, and while we do them with code written by other people, and what we do is therefore constrained by that code, we still have power to make and make use. We construct our own languages and our own customs, our own mythologies. We beat paths to each other; we pave roads. It’s not always peaceful or simple; it’s as messy and hurtful and complex as the “real” world.

That’s why it’s real.

But we take care of each other.

So I was sitting there on the couch at one in the morning, looking at this story and weeping and trying to understand exactly why, and all I could take from it was the feeling that I was looking at something I understood, that many people I know understand, which means something and is important but which is a little like a child’s secret country that fades when we grow up. That can’t last. Neither contacts nor code are endlessly sustainable. Networks decay and nodes fade into obscurity, wink out of existence one by one.

This is not about age, but it is about time.

What I think is that when we write about these things, when we write about these technologies and these spaces and what it means to live there, we sometimes have a tendency to oversimplify in the service of analysis. Which is fine; analysis is for a necessary thing and it does a necessary job. But when I’m sitting there crying over a goddamn story I just wrote, what I think is that this is all more complicated that I have the most remote possible prayer of ever being able to explain in a journal article or a conference presentation. What I can say about it with absolute certainty is that it is.

We live here until we don’t anymore.

All we ever have is each other.

I loved those people. I loved every one of them. The people I never met. The people whose names and faces I never knew until I was watching them kill themselves. The people who mourned for them and invited me to mourn with them. We said we loved each other. We all said it. Over and over. Like hands across a chasm, groping in the dark. Trying to hold on. Knowing that, in the end, we probably couldn’t save anyone. All we could do was be there until they were gone, and be with whoever was left.

I remember how it was. I remember it. I remember it so well. I’m drowning in remembering.

Twitter and Dove have teamed up in a new campaign to combat criticisms of women’s bodies on social media. The #SpeakBeautiful campaign, which kicked off with a short video (shown above) during the pre-show of this year’s Academy Awards, cites the staggering statistic that women produced over 5 million negative body image Tweets last year. The campaign implores women to stop this, to focus on what is beautiful about each of us, and bring our collective beauty to the fore. Set to musical crescendo and the image of falling dominos, this message is both powerful and persuasive.

Sadly, it gets feminism and women’s empowerment fundamentally wrong. Women’s bodies have historically been sites of objectification and critique. They still are. From politicians to athletes, women are continually required to account for their bodies. I have yet to receive end of semester student evaluations that didn’t comment on my attire and appearance (did you know leggings aren’t pants!?) The work of feminism is to do away with such objectification; to reject the equation of beauty with human value. #SpeakBeautiful not only fails in this endeavor, but actively reaffirms women’s positions as—first and foremost—beautiful objects.

In its very name, #SpeakBeautiful centers physical attractiveness as the proper metric with which to measure women’s value. Rather than decenter or reject this metric, it asks women to give one another high scores. Broadening the standards of beauty does nothing to abolish the requirement that women be beautiful. I repeat: broadening the standards of beauty does nothing to abolish the requirement that women be beautiful (I’m talking to you, Strong is the New Skinny).

Of course, it is in Dove’s interest to maintain the requirement to be beautiful. They sell beauty products, after all. It is not, however, in women’s interests. Yet it is women who Dove recruits to give voice to their campaign. Indeed, this campaign of objectification only works if women—lots of women—actively participate.

I realize it may seem unfair to throw such strong critiques upon a well-meaning campaign, with well-meaning supporters. It’s true that most advertising campaigns offer no feminist agenda. It’s true that many advertising campaigns unapologetically render women mere tools of male sexual pleasure. But these campaigns don’t masquerade as progress.

Cultural products that claim social justice are the very objects we must examine most closely, and call out—loudly—when they get it wrong. #SpeakBeautiful is insidious in its feminist cloak. Its bold rejection of negative body-talk can easily lull us into not only compliance, but active participation in the very structures and logics that make negative body-talk such a painful and effective weapon against women.

I have a secret to tell all of you: I kind of don’t care about teaching evolution in science classes. Put another way, I’m less than convinced that most people, having learned the story of species differentiation and adaptation, go on to live fuller and more meaningful lives. In fact, the way we teach evolution ­­––with a ferocious attention toward competition and struggle in adverse circumstances–– might be detrimental to the encouragement of healthy and happy communities. I also see little reason to trust the medical community writ-large, and I cringe when a well-meaning environmentalist describes their reaction to impending climate change by listing all of the light bulbs and battery-powered cars they bought. I suppose –given my cynical outlook– that the cover story of this month’s National Geographic is speaking to me when it asks “Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?” Good question: what the hell is wrong with me?

Joel Achenbach, the author of the cover story, assumes that most people doubt science because they either do not understand it, or find a much more compelling explanation for what they see in the world. Moon landing truthers, anti-vaccination advocates, adherents to intelligent design, and global warming denialists all share misinformation that somehow feels more satisfying because they corroborate foregone conclusions about how the world works. Stanely Kubrick faked the moon landing, for example, because it is easier to believe the government covered something up than accomplished something great. While science literacy goes some way in explaining why less people vaccinate their children and no one cares about the impending heat death of our planet, that is not the only thing going on here.

Science isn’t just a set of facts or a method for arriving at those facts, it’s a collection of institutions, and those institutions haven’t given many people a reason to trust them, let alone go to bat for them when they are embattled. The spoils of science have been severely misallocated and there is little reason to trust, let alone pay attention to, science experts. Austerity has ravaged health services, making relationships with health professionals few and far between. Industrial disasters seem to be increasing in frequency while major scientific breakthroughs and engineering achievements are reserved for those that can afford them. College is less affordable than ever before. The question should not be why do many reasonable people doubt science” it’s the opposite: “why do many reasonable people still believe in science at all?”

Medical science has certainly made lots of breakthroughs, but only a miniscule portion of the global population has benefited from those advances. Climate change might be a looming threat that demands immediate action, but it is hard to care about 50 years from now when you don’t know where tomorrow’s dinner is coming from.

Achenbach chalks up this lack of trust, as an internal battle between what seems intuitively real and what science reveals to be fact. He cites a behavioral study, which “indicates that as we become scientifically literate, we repress our naive beliefs but never eliminate them entirely.” The example he gives is so telling of his class position that it is worth a long block quote:

Most of us [make sense of the world] by relying on personal experience and anecdotes, on stories rather than statistics. We might get a prostate-specific antigen test, even though it’s no longer generally recommended, because it caught a close friend’s cancer—and we pay less attention to statistical evidence, painstakingly compiled through multiple studies, showing that the test rarely saves lives but triggers many unnecessary surgeries. Or we hear about a cluster of cancer cases in a town with a hazardous waste dump, and we assume pollution caused the cancers. Yet just because two things happened together doesn’t mean one caused the other, and just because events are clustered doesn’t mean they’re not still random.

We have trouble digesting randomness; our brains crave pattern and meaning. Science warns us, however, that we can deceive ourselves. To be confident there’s a causal connection between the dump and the cancers, you need statistical analysis showing that there are many more cancers than would be expected randomly, evidence that the victims were exposed to chemicals from the dump, and evidence that the chemicals really can cause cancer.

Yes, it would be nice to know if the chemicals used in commercial and industrial processes caused cancer. Unfortunately, many of the hazards that we face every day go undetected, especially in under-served communities. If your fire department or school is underfunded, there’s a good chance the EPA is not monitoring your air very well either. Also, as Candice Lanius wrote last month, demands for statistical proof are not evenly levied across all populations. White and affluent people get their anecdotes taken seriously while the poor and disenfranchised must come up with statistics to corroborate their personal experiences.

Even if we lived in a world where everyone had to prove their position with statistical data, and there were monitoring stations evenly distributed across the country, we would still face the issue of what political sociologists of science call “organized ignorance.” That is, powerful actors like governments and companies make a point to not understand things so that they are difficult or impossible to regulate. Whether it is counting the number of sexual assaults, or the amount of chemicals used in fracking, intentionally not collecting data is a powerful tool. So while I agree with Achenbach that people should base important decisions on sound data, we should also acknowledge that access to data is deeply uneven.

Assuming that access to the Internet is the same as having access to data is like wondering why all of the wires in your house aren’t generating any electricity. If you wanted to know why everyone in your community is getting sick, and all of your searching revealed that the no one even bothered to collect the data, why would you go back to the same sources to know about the origin of the human race? Why would you care what these people have to say about your body if there is a big gray NO DATA polygon over your neighborhood in an air quality map? In many cases, what Achenbach characterizes as a competition between science and misinformation is actually the latter filling a vacuum.

Maybe Achenbach and everyone else that writes about science denialism knows this, and this is why they act so surprised when “well educated and affluent” people stop vaccinating their children. Why would the affluent –the people that science serves best– start questioning the validity of science? After all, it is the poor that were used as guinea pigs for medical research. It was poor southern black people that were mislead into believing they were being treated for a disease, not rich Bay Area yuppies. [1]

I would venture to make an educated, maybe even socially scientific, guess that while the rich can afford to construct purity narratives that put vaccines in the same category as pesticides and preservatives, the rest of us still react positively to the ethics of care that vaccines engender: the common good over profit. It is the kind of care that encouraged Jonas Salk to sell the polio vaccine at cost. Vaccines are one of the few medical technologies that don’t follow the pill-every-day-for-the-rest-of-your-life business model. You aren’t renting your health with a daily supplement; you are doing something to yourself that keeps others safe as well. You take on the pain and burden of getting the shot so that those too weak to take it aren’t put in harm’s way. If you stop thinking of the affluent as the only people capable of making an informed and collective decision, and start thinking of them as selfish actors that can’t imagine their bodies working the same way a poor person’s body works, the education paradox disappears.

The selfishness of the rich is also the unspoken necessary condition for climate change denial. The interests of corporations who have a direct financial interest in the fossil fuel status quo are certainly a big part of the equation, but let’s not forget that those people already experiencing the effects of climate change are those people that have been pushed to the least hospitable parts of the world. Indigenous populations have been at the forefront of climate change activism, much more so than the reticent scientists that are concerned about being marked as political actors. There was little fear of politicization when American scientists were vulnerable to nuclear annihilation but the far-off danger of climate change doesn’t seem to motivate middle-aged scientists. Why, again, should these institutions and the people that work in them, be treated as stewards of truth and trust? Why is it everyone else that should be chastised?

Finally, what did I mean by my first example when I said evolution doesn’t help foster community? What does evolutionary theory have to do with preparing people to be a part of a fulfilling community? Knowing about the slow but steady changes that turned ape-like common ancestors into apes and humans shouldn’t have anything to do with how I get along with my neighbor.

If you ever watch a show like Doomsday Preppers (On the National Geographic Channel!) you might know where I am going with this. The show tracks families and individuals who are convinced that “life as we know it” will end within their lifetime. They are compelled to act in preparation for what they believe to be the natural state of humanity. The story of how people will react without creature comforts or law enforcement is remarkably similar regardless of whether they are prepping for an Earthquake or a financial collapse: Hobbesian war of all against all. It’s no surprise then, that a typical prepper household has lots of canned food and guns.

How do we get such a uniform story from a wide range of people? Part of the answer is obviously the producers who want to craft a particular story, but there is also a popular notion that, if left to our own devices, humans without government and the threat of violence will compete with each other to the death. There are many different contributors to this myth, but science education is a big one. Many school children would be surprised, for example, to hear that Darwin never wrote the phrase “survival of the fittest.” That phrase actually came form Herbert Spencer, a foundational utilitarian philosopher usually cited by libertarians.

I bring this up because my argument is much more than a “what has science done for me lately” complaint. There are values and perspectives embedded in the work. As Donna Haraway famously said, scientists are not the mere “modest witnesses” they claim to be. Science is a human enterprise that intersects with race, class, and gender power relationships. The work of Darwin and his contemporaries never focused so heavily on competition and dog-eat-dog environments. The naturalist and anarchist scholar Pytor Kropotkin even wrote a book, and had several exchanges with Darwin, about species’ tendency to provide mutual aid in times of scarcity. The downplaying of cooperation and the focus on competition, despite many examples of both, shows the final and most basic reason for doubting science: it doesn’t feel like a tool of liberation anymore.

I would care much more about the teaching of evolution in classrooms if it taught that cooperation and reciprocity, the sorts of things that make strong communities and fulfill lives, were foundational to life itself. I would care more about stopping anti-vaccination movements if I thought anyone other than the most selfish among us were able to believe them. I would do more about climate change if scientists worked to prevent it as much as they work to bring products to market. I would convince people that we actually landed on the moon if I thought there was any political will left in my country to do something that amazing within my lifetime. I doubt science because it doubts us.

[1] Correction: this essay originally stated that people were injected with the syphilis virus. The Tuskegee experiments, in fact, mislead participants into believing they were being treated when they were not.

I was doing a post on writing for my author blog, and I wanted an image for it, so off to the Flickr Creative Commons search I went. I searched the “writing’ keyword. Almost all of what I got back was some version of the above. Almost all of the rest of it was just random stuff. There were a few shots of laptops or computers but they nearly always also prominantly included notebooks and pens/pencils. Do a Google image search for “writing” and you get the same damn thing. All very attractive photos of pens and hands and often lovely, swooping script.

I do not write that way.

I can’t write that way.

I have a disability called dysgraphia, which manifests – among other ways – as severe difficulty in writing on paper. It involves both impaired motor function/coordination and a form of dyslexia in terms of the production of words. It’s impossible for me to hold a writing implement “correctly”. I get horrible hand cramps. My handwriting itself is illegible. I often get letters or words in the wrong order. Consistent use of capital letters? Hahaha no.

When I write on a keyboard all of that goes away and everything flows wonderfully. I couldn’t write without a keyboard. Without a keyboard, I am probably not a writer at all.

Why does this matter? It matters because we aestheticize the visual process and tools of writing as a part of the process of romanticizing it (which is sorta bullshit anyway). In so doing, we legitimize certain kinds of writing while at the same time delegitimizing others and even rendering them invisible. Most of the time I don’t think we intend to do that, just like we don’t intend to do most things like that. We just have a fixed idea of what Writing is and everything we attach to that idea reinforces it.

Okay, but why does it matter? Well, to start with, it’s at least vaguely ableist simply because it ignores the existence of people like me, and others who for one reason or another can’t depend on physical handwriting to produce words, and that’s already a toxic cultural process. Not a fan of anything which contributes to it.

But it also matters, I think, because it’s yet another symptom of our general tendency to (still) privilege the non-digital over the digital. There’s something about words produced on paper (preferably attractive paper with an attractive fountain pen, or even a quill for God’s sake and I’m not really kidding about that last) which is more real because of where it is and how it’s being done. My kind of writing? Unreal, and not just because of the aesthetic. And in fact, the aesthetic is part of what reinforces the idea of what’s real in this case. It’s also associated with the ways in which a tremendous amount of people still seem to feel that paper books are more real and more legitimate than ebooks, despite ebooks being enormously popular.

And I think a huge number of us now write on keyboards.

Is this really harmful to me? Immediately, no. More than anything it’s annoying. But looking at that stream of images, it was difficult to miss, and it was also difficult to miss what it meant.

There’s a tricky balancing act to play when thinking about the relative influence of technological artifacts and the humans who create and use these artifacts. It’s all too easy to blame technologies or alternatively, discount their shaping effects.

Both Marshall McLuhan and Actor Network Theorists (ANT) insist on the efficaciousness of technological objects. These objects do things, and as researchers, we should take those things seriously. In response to the popular adage that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” ANT scholar Bruno Latour famously retorts:

It is neither people nor guns that kill. Responsibility for action must be shared among the various actants

From this perspective, failing to take seriously the active role of technological artifacts, assuming instead that everything hinges on human practice, is to risk entrapment by those artifacts that push us in ways we cannot understand or recognize. Speaking of media technologies, McLuhan warns:

Subliminal and docile acceptance of media impact has made them prisons without walls for their human users.

This, they get right. Technology is not merely a tool of human agency, but pushes, guides, and sometimes traps users in significant ways. And yet both McLuhan and ANT have been justly criticized as deterministic. Technologies may shape those who use them, but humans created these artifacts, and humans can—and do— work around them.

In working through the balance of technological influence and human agency, the concept of “affordances” has come to the fore. Affordances are the specifications of a technology which guide—but do not determine—human users. It is rare to read a social study of technology without reference to the affordances of the artifact(s) of interest. Although some argue the term is so widely used it no longer contains analytic value, I strongly believe its place remains essential. The power of “affordance” as an analytic tool is its recognition of technology as efficacious, without falling prey to the determinism of McLuhan and ANT.

We can, however, improve the nuance with which we employ the concept. Primarily, a delineation of affordances currently answers the question of “what?” That is, it tells us what component parts the artifact contains and what this implies for the user. For instance, the required gender designation of Facebook pushes users to identify their bodies into a single social category. The dropdown menu limits those options vis-à-vis a write in, but expands the options through multiple gender designations beyond male and female. These are some of the affordances of the Facebook platform, and they influence how users engage the platform in gendered ways. This is an important point, but I argue that we can better employ affordances through theorizing the “how?” in addition to the what. How for example, does Facebook push users to identify with a gender category? Do they make the user do so, or simply make it difficult for the user not to? In other words, the how tells us the degree of force with which the whats are implemented.

This issue of how came to me while talking with my students about technological affordances. An astute student asked about the difference between a wood privacy fence and a perimeter rope. They both afford the same thing, he correctly noticed, but in different ways. We collectively decided that while the fence tells you to stay off the property, the rope politely (though often effectively) asks.

I propose a rudimentary typology for the question of how, in which a technological affordance can request, demand, allow, or encourage. The first two refer to bids placed upon the user by the artifact. The latter two are the artifact’s response to (desired) user action. I welcome tweaks, suggestions, and of course applications.

A technological artifact requests when it pushes a user in some direction, but without much force. This is an affordance a user can easily navigate around. For instance, Facebook requests that users include a profile image, but one can sign up and engage the service without doing so. Similarly, David Banks’ coffee maker requests that he live in a spacious home, but still agrees to make coffee in his modest residence.

A technological artifact demands when its use is conditioned on a particular set of circumstances. Facebook demands, for instance, that users select a gender category before signing up, and Keurig demands its users make coffee with Keurig brand K-cups. Although demand runs the risk of technological determinism, it is important to note that even demands can be rebuffed, though the obstacle may be significant. For instance, one might jailbreak an iPhone, subverting its demand that distribution rests solely with Apple. Or, with likely much greater difficulty, one might craft their own K-cup, subverting Keurig’s demand on brand loyalty. I think we could say/fight more about demands, but I’m kind of looking forward to hashing it out on Twitter and in the comments.

Thinking about the difference between request and demand, we can imagine signing up for some service through an online form. The form has several blank categories for the applicant to fill in. Those spots with red stars are required. Those without red stars are not required. The form therefore asks the applicant to fill in all of the information, but demands that they fill in particular parts.

The second two categories refer to an artifact’s response to those things a user may wish to do.

A technological artifact allows when its architecture permits some act, but does so with relative indifference or even disapproval. The Facebook status update allows users to post links, text, and images. One can post short quips or longer narratives. These narratives can potentially follow a variety of affective lines, such as joy, excitement, depression, or disappointment. Keurig allows users to make a variety of coffee flavors and strengths, offering a host of these through the machine-compatible brand. The user can also potentially run water through the same K-cup twice, reducing the value of each individual pod, though the technological artifact does not invite the user to do so.

A technological artifact encourages when its architecture makes a particular line of action easy and appealing, especially vis-à-vis alternative lines of action. It fosters, breeds, nourishes something, while stifling, suppressing, discouraging something else. Facebook, for example, encourages users to produce content, providing a host of templates and a centrally located status update box complete with a prompt: “What’s on your mind?” It further encourages interaction by providing “notifications” of relevant activity at the top of the page in an eye-catching red font and sending these notifications to user’s mobile devices. Twitter, in turn, encourages short blips and link sharing, while Tumblr encourages longer form engagement. Both, like Facebook, encourage engaged interaction.

In examining the how, the what remains critically important. It is the what that the artifact requests, demands, allows, or encourages. Affordances enable and constrain. That is, they are always a product of, and subject to, human agency. However, facilitations and constraints operate at different levels. This typology is useful in understanding the degree to which each affordance is open to negotiation. It recognizes not only the mutual influence of human and machine, but the variable nature of this relationship.

My small city of Troy, New York is drawing up a new comprehensive plan. Lots of towns and even universities do this from time to time as a way of coordinating and re-aligning the institutions and organizations into some kind of general direction. These sorts of moments encourage individuals to be reflective as well as divisive. There’s a lot at stake (or at least it feels that way) and people feel the need to protect what they see as threatened by change, or go on the offensive and try to root out what they see as a long-standing problem. More than anything, these sorts of comprehensive planning efforts force us to confront our everyday lives as a set of conditions and decisions that exist outside of our control but are ultimately steerable if enough political will can be leveraged, if enough organizing around a particular issue gets done. Last night, a wide variety of people came together to discuss what they thought was working and what was needed attention in our city.

The person that led this meeting was cordial, professional, and did as good a job as can be expected in her position. There was, however, a moment where a huge oversight felt like it was being brushed under the rug. A friend of mine (who just started this great project) brought up a procedural problem that, from my own experience in urban planning, is pretty common: the team that was putting together the comprehensive plan had lots of plans to meet with established organizations and institutions but had no plan to reach out to unorganized people. That is, those people who are systematically and continually denied access to the time, resources, or cultural capital necessary to form or join organizations. People who are too busy making ends meet, or are overlooked by the majority of their fellow citizens are (unfortunately) in the optimal position to tell planners what the city has over-looked and even what needs to be done to fix what are certainly systemic problems. The meeting facilitator had nothing to say, except that people should encourage friends to attend the scheduled meetings.

This interaction left a really bad taste in my mouth and I don’t think I was alone in that sentiment. This morning, when I read that three young Muslim students were killed (they were so much more than that label, but we also can’t forget that it was that label that led to their killing) by a 40-something white atheist, I couldn’t help but see a distant but deep connection between the deafening silence in the national media, and that meeting facilitator. This silence, the illegibility of the pain and suffering of the disenfranchised, on the part of decision makers and media gatekeepers, creates and sustains injustice.

In comparison to shootings that leave white bodies on the ground, there was a palpable silence in social and print media about the tragic events in Chapel Hill. As I write this there is no #Iam hashtag, no national conversation. It is a blackout with a familiar form; a far too predictable collection of mumbles and qualifications that turn a definitive and calculated hate crime into senseless violence.

the problem with Je suis Charlie is that I’m not, and to use that slogan – and to go no further with the conversation – obscures at least some of the extremely problematic and troubling things that accompany any ideals of free speech in a world in which some people are simply not free, and in which the speech of others produces and reproduces the cultures that keep them that way.

Today we are experiencing the inverse of this argument. Twitter’s trending hashtags suggests that Americans can bring themselves to talk about the #ChapelHIllShooting but they can’t utter their names. They can’t be these people. While it is clear that we don’t need another parade of hoodie-clad white people claiming #IamTrayvon it is striking that there isn’t even an attempt to do so. White America can immediately identify with a racist French satire magazine they’ve never heard of, but can’t possibly stand in solidarity with fellow Americans that also happen to be Muslim.

The straight-forward narrative that makes #JeSuisCharlie so legible to so many people is inaccessible to the marginal. The causes of violence perpetrated by white men is exploded by white supremacist patriarchy’s insistence that each instance of white terror is actually the confluence of psychological illness, the availability of guns, video games, or anything else that doesn’t threaten the racial order or patriarchy head-on.

When uprisings occur, when people that are systematically denied the preconditions of solidarity ––the ability to continually meet each-other unharassed, a common language, the material support to mobilize against one’s oppressors–– find them through perseverance and creativity, the invisible background radiation that maintains their oppression suddenly becomes opaque and solid. The sustained and largely invisible strategies of hegemony are temporarily traded in for the tactics of swift and immediate police violence. To those not paying attention it might seem to come out of nowhere, but for everyone else it is utterly predictable.

Hashtags, civil society organizations, third places, and all the other intangibles that make up a “community” are privileges for the disenfranchised. We typically think of the local bar or a knitting circle as places of repose and entertainment but they are actually deeply important organizational forces that connect individuals to mechanisms of power. They are the places where shared challenges are identified, and proposed solutions are crafted. They also provide space for mental health and stability. Even the most dedicated and vigilant activist needs a home to come back to, a place where they don’t need to defend their beliefs or even their own identity.

How is it anything more than laughable that an otherwise reasonable person could believe that this shooting had more to do with a parking space than skin color and religion? How could it be that there is not only silence but active efforts to complicate and explain away something as utterly predictable as white man plays God? Any single instance of white supremacy, whether it is this shooting or the maintenance of de facto segregation in my city, is over-determined. There are dozens of “just so” arguments that stand ready to supplant a direct identification of racial violence at work. White supremacy itself is a coward who hides behind historic contingencies.

Confronting hegemonic violence requires organizing and broad-based solidarity. That seems beyond debate, but what that looks like and how it behaves is still unclear. We are going to have more of the awkward, infuriating, and contentious problems like the ones Jenny Davis experienced on her own campus last week. Attention needs to be paid to who is speaking, what their standpoint is, and whether or not the same old people are looking for attention or if they are willing to step back and let others take the stage. How do movements negotiate uneasy alliances like the ones forged last December between liberal anti-consumerist activists and the more radical #BlackLivesMatter insurgents. How do social media actors like livestreamers scale up and navigate attention topographies without inadvertently stealing the spotlight? For now it is enough to keep these questions and concerns in the back of our minds but the answers need to come sooner rather than later.

Jasmine Rand, lawyer for Trayvon Martin’s family, came and spoke at my university last week. I held my breath as she walked out on stage. She began with the emotional announcement that we were on the eve of what would have been Trayvon’s 20th birthday. Along with a crowd full of students, professors, staff, and members of the community, I settled on the edge of my seat and listened eagerly for what this woman, in this moment of racial upheaval, had to say. As I tweeted just before the talk: this was a big deal.

The talk had no official hashtag, and the #JMU hashtag was entirely populated by tweets about the basketball game going on at the same time. With no backchannel and no one to tweet with, I put my iPad away. Fine, I thought, Turkle-esq undistracted presence it is.

About an hour later, I was somewhere between bewilderment and seething anger. The talk was not just disappointing, but downright offensive. This person, this supposed defender of justice and crusader for equality, had used the death of a young black man and the subsequent non-conviction of his killer as a platform for self-aggrandizement (and I imagine financial gain). With a captive audience of young minds—college students in a prime position to take action—she, a white woman, spent 45 minutes talking about her personal journey through law school, and about 15 minutes talking about race relations. In those 15 minutes, she politely preached colorblindness. Not only did she fail to address systems of racial oppression, but advocated “love” as the penultimate solution.

I believe in love as much as the next person and I agree that love should be part of both academic and political discourse. But what about Stand your Ground? What about Stop and Frisk? What about broken windows policing? It’s not lack of love that makes black men disproportionately vulnerable to police violence. It’s wasn’t lack of love that failed to indict the officers who killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Love would not have saved 12 year old Tamir Rice.

The talk ended and the organizers prepared the room for questions. Remembering my dormant iPad, I pulled it out. That was SO bad, I thought, someone must have commented. No dice. The #JMU Twitter feed was still mostly basketball, speckled with excited announcements of Rand’s upcoming talk. Including mine. Ugh.

If the talk was bad, the question answer session was even more troublesome. Young women stood up, profusely thanked Rand, and asked for advice on getting into/through law school. Faculty cordially asked her to expand on her love thesis. People clapped after each of her responses, which consisted almost entirely of “follow your heart” and “be true to yourself,”along with a personal story about how she does just that. One brave student tried to challenge her, but the question wasn’t perfectly articulated. She took the opportunity to twist what he said and then refused to answer. The crowd clapped for that, too.

I was screaming inside my head. Will nobody stand up and force the issue of systemic racism? Will nobody ask her to account for the conditions under which Trayvon Martin’s killer was deemed innocent by a jury of his peers? Will no one push this woman, acting as a voice for a social justice movement, to get outside of herself and address the devastating failures of the justice system? What is wrong with everybody!?, I wondered. Do they have no courage, or do they simply not get it?

Amidst this internal rant, I realized that I am them. I was not asking these important questions. I was the one with no courage. About this time, one of the colleagues I was sitting with signaled that she was ready to leave. In a daze, I got up and walked with my small group out into the lobby and then into the cold night air. We were all silent for a moment. And then, to my great relief, we all exploded into conversation about our dissatisfaction with the talk. And yet, none of us spoke up in front of the crowd. The content of the talk, including questions and answers, was wholly uncritical. Our dissatisfaction, and undoubtedly, the dissatisfaction of many in the room, was never brought to the record.

This bothered me a lot. It still does. It is especially bothersome because she is a voice of authority, and many students in the audience were therefore primed to receive whatever message the talk produced. Critical questions by other figures of authority—such as faculty like me—could have changed that message. We didn’t do it. I didn’t do it.

I went home and ruminated. In an effort at damage control and an attempt to put something on record, I tweeted this:

The tweet was entirely ignored. No favorites. No retweets. No replies. It just hung there with nothing to latch onto and no one to address[i]. There was simply no platform in which to embed the message. There was no conversation for this tweet to disrupt.

It is here that we see the power of a hashtag. A hashtag does not just organize discussion, it also creates a space for discussion and sets the expectation that discussion will take place. I put my iPad away at the beginning of the talk because there was nowhere for me to place my thoughts; nowhere for me to go to read the thoughts of others. I didn’t livetweet because it made little sense to do so.

The consequences of this were substantial. The communicative effect of a hashtag is not additive, but productive. It doesn’t just tack onto existing discourse, but changes the discourse itself. The message of Rand’s talk included her words and those of the audience in the room. It could have also included the content of a Twitter feed. The content of this feed would not only affect the meaning of the talk as a whole, but primed those listening to hear Rand’s words from a different, more critical, perspective. Perhaps this would have encouraged others to express their own critiques through social media. Perhaps it would have incited defensive responses by Rand’s supporters. Perhaps more of us would have been willing to break through decorum and press Rand to defend her position. It could have been a fight. Instead, it was a willowy hour of personal stories and sanitized contentions.

In circumstances of differential power and authority, the hashtag is an important means by which the masses can become part of discourse. In all of its simplicity and seeming banality, the hashtag holds liberatory functions. It provides a space for comment and a platform for dissent. It augments discourse not just through the use of multiple media, but through the inclusion multiple voices. The absence of a hashtag—intentional or not—therefore becomes a mechanism of silence. Without a clear platform, we can speak, but to whom and to what end?

[i] I included the speaker through an @connect, but her page has strict privacy settings and my message was not displayed. Her privacy settings are in place for good reason. I Imagine Trayvon Martin’s lawyer would otherwise be bombarded by ridicule and threats by white supremacists.

“It is a HUGE SHAME that the company decided to remove the ability to use your own coffee grounds in the home brew k-cup. …They should have just said we made these changes so our products would sell more so we could make a bigger profit,” reads a typical review. “They took a potentially killer machine and added horrible DRM – a rights management system, in the greedy attempt to get all other coffee pod manufacturers to pay them so their pods work,” reads another of the hundreds of one-star reviews. Many lamented the ability to give no stars. If you Google “Keurig 2.0,” the first thing that autocompletes is “hack.”

There’s not a tremendous amount that’s surprising about this, and I frankly don’t have much to add that I didn’t say back then, or that anyone else hasn’t already said about this. The Verge article is especially perceptive in terms of pointing out that the fact that this is about coffee is in itself significant; the kind of people who would probably buy a Keurig are people who probably have a particular relationship with this kind of coffee and are looking for a particular kind of coffee experience. Easy, convenient – which also indicates a versatility which DRM of any kind destroys.

DRM constrains use, which is the enemy of the versatile. It takes products and technologies and devices that might be fabulously nimble, highly adaptable, and renders them useful within a very narrow range of functionality. My husband recently jailbroke his iPhone; I knew about a lot of the features that allowed one to institute, and I understood the general culture behind tearing down the walls around Apple’s pristine garden, but it was still remarkable to see what that process turned the iPhone into: something far more useful and far more powerful than Apple was permitting it to be. Far more friendly.

The kind of DRM Keurig was putting in place is a natural extension of the control pretty much all companies who produce technology of any kind try to maintain over how those devices are used. It’s not unusual and there should be nothing surprising about it. I’ve written somewhat depressingly about what I’ve perceived as the inevitability of this kind of control, especially as it becomes both less visible and more normalized, but I’ve somewhat revised that view. Not just because of the kind of loud annoyance that seems to arise every time something like this happens and the messages that kind of loud annoyance sends, but also because of the sheer – almost joyful – creativity involved in the idea of hackingyour coffeemaker. No one likes having to do something like that, and the necessity itself is ridiculous, but there’s something about that kind of resistance I find very satisfying.

Again: nothing particularly new about the observation that there are opportunities for both the exertion of control and the act of resistance in situations like this – political and commercial and whatever, everything in between. But yeah, I kind of see some connections to be drawn between resisting an asshole coffemaker company and resisting an oppressive political regime. If you tilt your head and squint. A bit.

And I’m pleased that Keurig paid for being stupid about this. That’s always satisfying too.

It is certainly good news that the Obama Administration has come out strong for net neutrality. The President recently made an announcement that his office would help promote local broadband competition as part of a broader effort to improve the country’s data infrastructure. More specifically, the federal government plans to help municipalities develop their own data networks, fight state laws that prevent municipal governments from offering public broadband options, and help small businesses compete in local markets with companies like Verizon and Time Warner. The chairman of the FCC followed suit by announcing (in WIRED Magazine…?) yesterday that he would be circulating a proposal to apply Title II to telecom companies and mobile phone carriers, effectively making it illegal to throttle connections based on what sorts of services you are connecting to. This is all good news but I’m also hesitant to trust local authorities with my internet connection. Aren’t these the same governments that defend murderous police forces and cooperated with the federal government to shut down political dissent? Why should these organizations control the network? While I am definitely not a fan of huge telecom corporations, I don’t trust my local government either.

I don’t mean to rain on the parade of those (many of which I know personally) who have fought long and hard for this victory. The people at the forefront of the net neutrality debate generally see these recent events as a good thing and, for the most part, I tend to agree. Having the option to choose from multiple Internet Service Providers, including public ones that do not have to turn a profit, will most certainly bring down the cost and maybe even increase the quality of service. And, if there were something seriously wrong with the quality of my connection, I would much rather try to fight city hall than spend a day lost in a Time Warner phone tree.

When local governments decide to invest in infrastructure they not only increase the standard of living for their residents, they also tend to save lots of money. I grew up in Broward County Florida where they just recently completed their own fiber optic backbone which cost $2.5 million to build but will save them nearly $800,000 a year in leasing fees they used to pay to a private company. This is actually a fairly old strategy. The city I live in now (Troy, New York) decided decades ago that it would build a reservoir for municipal water. It works so well that the city actually turns a profit by selling their water to nearby municipalities who never bothered to think that far ahead. Another nearby town has a small hydroelectric dam that supplies the town with cheap and clean electricity. And of course there’s the United States Postal Service, something that would be making a healthy profit if Congress didn’t sabotage them. This stuff isn’t hard and it isn’t new, but there are some unique aspects of broadband that deserve attention, especially now.

Entrusting the Internet to municipalities seems particularly nerve-wracking given their outright hostile response to protests against their police departments. If public officials are willing to make excuses for murder, it stands to reason they might be willing to shut down the network that helps organize the public’s response. In 2011 BART officials shut down cell phone service in their stations during a protest and, in so doing, inadvertently gave us a preview of what municipally owned internet could look like. Even Troy has had its own share of systematic police terror. It isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that city officials in my town or yours, would take it upon themselves to shut down the network in the face of protest.

The Internet is equal parts public utility infrastructure, postal service, and free press. It can’t be governed like water, but it certainly shouldn’t be privately sold like cable television either. The old offices and bureaucracies of the 20th century are ill equipped to democratically manage something like the Internet. For-profit companies will inevitably look to give you the least amount of service for the most money, and have no interest in the sort of redistributive justice that public services should provide. That is a straightforward inevitability that does not change with the size of the company. Governments should be the institutions that manage our public goods but, at least right now, they have not proven themselves to be worthy of our trust. What is desperately needed now, and it must be sooner rather than later, is creative approaches to governance. There has to be a firewall (pun intended) between governing bodies and the stewards of the network.

There already exist a myriad of public-private partnerships and community-led broadband initiatives but as far as I know, none of them have really thought deeply about making network administration a democratic process. We need citizen oversight boards and very clear laws about who can and cannot give orders to the people that run and maintain the network. There could even be citizen-run broadband networks where decisions about everything from pay rates to capped speeds are debated and decided upon through an online decision-making system. There has got to be as many ways of governing networks, as there are networks to be governed.

Whatever institution ends up holding the keys to the DNS server cabinets, lets at least try to make them organizations that foster exciting and interesting debate and media creation. At present, too many cities and towns don’t have public access media, Public access television is usually laughed at as hokey or poor quality but the future of public media doesn’t have to be that way. Every city in the United States could have well-appointed production studios open to the public and probably for less money than it cost to establish public libraries a hundred years ago.

I want better broadband, and I want the network to be democratically owned and operated. I’m happy about the direction we’re going in, but we need to be careful we don’t run from one problem to another. We need to think about the state of our democratic institutions and how much we can really trust them to be the stewards of our digital commons. It is a false dichotomy to assume that we have to either stick with our present oligarchy or hand over that power to municipal governments and smaller for-profit enterprises. There has got to be more participatory and democratic organizational forms out there and now is exactly the time to start building them.